couple of seasons back The Sopranos poked fun at earnest citizen Larry Arthur by having him chatter about the menace of crime while assisting a police investigation without knowing its target. The episode then shows him at home reading Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia.
Anarchy, State and Utopia posits a "minimalist state" which in the book's words "allows us, individually or with whom we choose, to choose our life and to realize our ends and conception of ourselves ... aided by the voluntary co-operation of other individuals."
Enter Tony Soprano and his crew to posit their own libertarian utopia, marked by the voluntary cooperation of gang members who realize their ends by killing those who get in their way. Recognizing that theory and practice meld well in such circumstances, Larry decides that it isn't in his self-interest to help the authorities nab Tony, social menace or not.
This was all very funny, even if Nozick's book wasn't written to provide television writers with a script prop for ruminations about civic duty. Over the last three decades Anarchy, State and Utopia framed the debate in the legal profession and elsewhere about the primacy of individual rights and the role of government. Written as a response to the John Rawls' A Theory of Justice, it provided a libertarian rebuttal to Rawl's arguments for growing government and using its powers to take from those who have and give to those who don't.
That battle continues, but Nozick helped make it intellectually respectable to question the bureaucratic welfare state. For him, individual rights were primary. The role of government was to protect the public peace, not to redistribute private wealth. The welfare reforms of the Clinton administration mark how far conventional thinking, and Democratic Party ideology in particular, has moved away from Rawl's ideas since Anarchy, State and Utopia was published in 1974.
To many intellectuals, Nozick was an apologist for social and economic self-interest. He returned the insults in a 1998 essay "Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?" which among other things argued that such "wordsmith" intellectuals feel a sense of superiority and entitlement to "society's highest rewards" and resent a social system that denies them their "just deserts."
Nozick died three weeks ago at age 63 after a long battle with cancer. He was a philosopher, not an attorney, but his arguments are recognizable to any lawyer with a civil libertarian bent. Law professor Richard Epstein called him "one of the two" most important voices of "individual liberty, private property and limited government in the twentieth century." (The other was Friedrich Hayek.)
Since the enthusiasts of individual philosophers generally write the obituaries, critics of Nozick's ideas have not been out in force since his death. It's been left to admirers like Epstein to summarize the critics' complaints, including one that accused Nozick of having "the moral sensibilities of a filling station attendant in a Midwestern state."
And even fans like Epstein grumble that Nozick retreated from his earlier, sharper individualist conclusions as he moved onto other areas of inquiry. Nozick once told an interviewer that, "I didn't want to spend my life writing The Son of Anarchy, State and Utopia."
He remained a skeptic to the end. In a recent interview with San Francisco's Laissez Faire Books, he explained his "little theory" on the "principle of proportional thinking." "Everybody thinks it's the most important thing that ought to be enforced [by government]." They just can't agree on what that most important thing is.
His subtlety and skepticism will keep Nozick from ever rising to the same level of deification that writers like Ayn Rand enjoy in Silicon Valley and other pockets of civil liberty groupthink. In self-absorbed, self-obsessed milieus, individual rights always trump civic duty or higher moral concerns.
But since Sept. 11 many ordinary Americans have distinguished themselves in extraordinary ways by recognizing broader obligations. Their achievements resulted from a reflexive need to act in defense of their nation. They are exemplified by the heroism of firefighters and police at the World Trade Center, and the special operations forces in Afghanistan, none of whom found glittering prizes in risking their lives. For them, worrying about their own self-interest was of less importance than defeating an enemy determined to destroy this nation.
Contemplating theoretical anarchy in the comfort of one's den is different from confronting it in the person of real life gangsters, terrorists or other rough beasts of the contemporary world. In wartime, enthusiasm for the minimalist state has receded even as citizens recognize that government cannot protect them in all circumstances. It's now up to citizen posses to take care of lunatics intent on murder and mayhem who make it on board airplanes with box cutters or exploding Nikes.
And that means individuals recognizing their civic duties and putting themselves at risk because of the coercive power of circumstances, not government. Perhaps even the fictional Larry Arthur would chose differently today.
Contributing writer George M. Kraw is an attorney in San Jose.
